


discourse of reason

by Macremae



Category: American Vandal (TV)
Genre: Autism, Character Study, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Mutual Pining, References to Hamlet, Stream of Consciousness, Unrequited Love, drama club, internalized ableism, or is it..... ohohoho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-21 15:15:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21077003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Macremae/pseuds/Macremae
Summary: Sam is playing Hamlet, Peter is manning the spotlight, and the world is a fucking panopticon: a character study of the man behind the camera.





	discourse of reason

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in. one night. i'm down in hell with this stupid fucking show and its so good and i hate phoebe for dragging me into it.

Peter isn’t like, a one hundred percent expert on the comings and goings of universal give and take, but he’s pretty sure this is payback for the meddling.

The situation unfolds just like the climax of all the best horror movies, tense and slow and horrifically painful: he’s on the catwalk above the stage, hands sweaty from the heat so far up in the rafters, shining the spotlight down onto Hamlet’s soliloquy number he-doesn’t-give-a-shit, and Sam is unintentionally eye-fucking him from several feet down below.

Well, okay. Not the best choice of words. It’s not fucking. Like, not “meaningless sex” fucking. More like making love. With eyes. Can eyes do that? Is eyefucking just a concept limited to animal intsincts? Peter is going to throw himself off the catwalk now.

The scene is the soliloquy, yes, and it’s the super famous one with the line everybody always puts on inspirational posters in classrooms and college advising offices and possibly cancer wards. That was possibly insensitive. Possibly not. Peter can’t tell. He’s having a conniption. 

He keeps fucking一 whatever. Okay. The point is.

The point is he needs to stay on topic with this inner monologue of his, mainly because if he doesn’t do literally anything to distract himself from Sam’s Theater Voice™ or whatever, he’s gonna jizz in his pants with longing. 

Oh, an ode to Sam’s Theater Voice™. Absolutely fucking delightful. Calm and demanding. Wins him a shit ton of good parts. Haunts Peter’s dreams like the motherfucking ghost dad in this stupid fucking play that he was only forced into because oh no Peter you need to be a team player and learn to get along with people outside of prying into their personal lives! This is why we didn’t let you skip eight grade! 

He could have totally skipped eighth grade. Peter’s smart. He’s extremely smart. Fuck you, Principal Howritz. Your salary is half my pay cut.

When, from booming down below, Sam says, “The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,” Peter wonders if it isn’t worth taking back up Catholisicm just to berate the thing upstairs for the absolute farcical tragedy that is his life. Dee- fucking-lightful. No, Hamlet, Peter has no idea what you could possibly mean. What is this concept, loving someone you don’t want to? Who very much doesn’t like you back? Get out of Peter’s diary (it’s a journal, of course, because Peter is gay but he doesn’t push it). 

Why oh fucking why did it have to be Hamlet? And why Sam as said Hamlet? With some zippy little twink from the bottom bin of the theater department prancing around as Horatio and ogling Sam (cool Sam, famous Sam, Sam from the Netflix show! So so amazing! Peter wants to commit homicide!). Fuck Edward and his stupid fucking neckerchief. 

This experience is bringing up a streak of violence Peter wasn’t aware existed in him. Maybe he needs therapy.

No一 Peter’s had therapy. That shit sucked. They showed him cards with big, comical facial expressions on them and asked him to identify what emotion was being portrayed. They asked him what makes a bowl a bowl, and scribbled down his answer with a frown (a bowl, he said, is just a slightly flatter cup depending on your ballpark for cup height). They made him sit in a room with kids who could barely talk or make a phone call or hold a conversation, and Peter doesn’t fault them for that, but it was so mind-numbingly boring he almost went insane.

That was where he first started making movies, at least in his head. While the nurse or psychologist or whatever was droning on about “finding common interests” or “choosing good emotional outlets,'' Peter would spin stories around in his head until they melted into pictures that moved faster and faster, anything he could dream of flickering to life just behind his eyes. When he found out there was a way to make those things real, it was like fire from Prometheus. He didn’t have to talk to people and analyze their words back. They talked to the camera.

And the scripts! The scripts he wrote played out so perfectly, smooth and just as the lines said they would. Everyone knew what to say. _Peter_ knew what to say. There wasn’t any chance of fucking up and making things weird or awkward; all he had to do was follow the story, and everything turned out okay in the end. Or, at least, he knew the ending.

Peter isn’t the same kind of fan of live theater. That’s… personal. There’s no barrier there, no screen or lens to separate audience from subject. The emotions feel wet and sticky, and so much could go wrong in front of so many people. Peter could fuck up in front of all these people. He could fumble with the light and push it over the ledge, and it could crash to the stage and explode. Sam would be hit and crushed, the bulb would catch the stage on fire and burn the school down, everyone in the auditorium would crumble slowly to death alongside Peter, trapped up too high to escape一

_Jesus, dude_, says the little voice in his head called Calm Down that sounds suspiciously like Sam. _There's practically a zero percent chance of that happening. Get out your inhaler and chill out_. 

Peter fumbles for his inhaler with a free hand and sucks hard. He chills out. Thank you, imaginary mental Sam who he uses to cope with the anxiety of being quote-unquote “quirky”.

That’s what his mom calls it, anyway. “Quirky”. Like it’s some sort of cute, funny thing rather than an annoying-ass disability that makes life infinitely fucking harder. She’s trying to be helpful, sure, and sweet, yeah, but. Y’know. It’s neither.

“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution,” says Sam, punctuating Peter’s teenage mope-fest with a frighteningly tonally appropriate couplet. Conscience, says Shakespeare. Yeah. That’s also something Peter knows.

Because like, he’s thought about it. Telling Sam. About the whole, “Hey dude, I’m not only very gay, not in the sense of being happy all the time because I’m not, but the sense that I want to kiss guys, and also, fun and mortifying sidebar, _you_ are at the top of the list of guys I want to kiss! How great! What a super way to completely ruin our friendship forever! I am a child prodigy, sayeth MENSA!” 

(Peter actually is a certified genius by MENSA. He doesn’t bring it up, ever. Too weird. Only Sam knows, and that’s because Sam actually thinks it’s cool for some reason.)

But that is a bad bad _bad_ idea, worst of Peter’s worst bad ideas, because while he can’t predict the outcome of every stupid thing he’s ever said, he can look down the line and see how that particular butterfly flaps its wings.

Sam either gets freaked the fuck out, which he has every right to do considering that Peter is (was) his best friend for years and didn’t say anything about being like, y’know, in love with him and stuff, or he decideds to be horribly cool about it and nothing changes at all. Except everything changes. Because now things are super awkward and their sleepovers are uncomfortably tense and weird, and Sam probably wouldn’t touch Peter on the shoulder/arm/hand nearly as much, and that just isn’t a world Peter wants to speculate about. Theory wiped. Case closed. No fucking thank you. 

There are these little moments where Peter will catch himself staring at Sam (for pitying example, one could choose right now) and he just feels so gross and creepy he has to look away. Like, what right does he have to be doing this? He _should_ tell Sam, the guy has a right to know and make his choice about that. It isn’t his fault Peter has weird mushy feelings for him, and he shouldn’t have to be unknowingly objectified because of it. Granted, Peter isn’t _trying_ to objectify him. He really wouldn’t want to. But he could be.

From behind the spotlight, Peter blinks. Oh crap. Is he doing it right now?

What is Hamlet even saying here? Peter barely remembers covering it in junior year English. Something about deciding whether or not to kill himself? To kill his stepdad (Peter seriously does not remember most of the names in this play)? “To be or not to be…” Be himself, maybe? It certainly does seem like he’s gay for that Horatio dude. Or maybe Sam just has terrible fucking taste in acting choices.

No, that’s mean. Sam is actually doing amazing right now. His makeup makes him look gaunt and haggard, a boy king stumbling over himself and his pride and fury to try and search for answers to life’s quest for him. And Peter knows how this ends: Hamlet dies. From like, a sword fight or something. And Horatio tenderly cradles him in his arms like that one line from the Richard Siken poem Peter found on some AV fan’s tumblr blog and ended up making him buy both books (and highlight and annotate them, and read them twice, and maybe okay cry a little shut up). It’s a Greek tragedy translated to Shakesperian candor. There aren’t any gods, but the world is just as unkind.

Well. His mom always did say he had the tendency to over dramatize things. Fucking Siken and Shakespeare compared to Peter’s all-too-modern nutcase of a life. Good God.

Movement down below catches Peter’s eye, and he leans slightly over the railing to watch Sam come to a stop center stage. He looks up, seemingly to the heavens, but his gaze catches Peter’s and his eyes look straight at him. Peter smirks and waves. Sam isn’t smiling.

He says, “Be all my sins remembered,” not to the gods, or God, or whatever, but to Peter. Peter. Okay. Maybe Sam is also reconsidering his life choices through the lense of a centuries old play. Weirder things have happened in this auditorium (oh how one remembers “I drew the dicks!”). 

He keeps looking at Peter. Why is he looking? Sam probably can’t even see him; the spotlight’s in his eyes. Hell, it definitely hurts. Why the fuck is he looking?

Sam blinks slowly, like a cat. Some die-hard Shakespeare fans are clapping, probably getting their weekly masturbation session in hearing the most famous monologue in pretty much all of theater (honestly, Peter prefers Tony Kushner. No, he’s not a walking stereotype. He has taste). Peter blinks back, faster. Sam can’t see him. He really, really can’t see him. He’s still looking.

Something soft and funny churns in Peter’s gut. The line means, he thinks he remembers, “Beauty, may you forgive all my sins in your prayers”. There is something beautiful about this; Sam drenched in light, pale skin and black clothes, praying up to Peter when no one else knows. Or Hamlet. Hamlet is praying.

Maybe there’s no difference, really.


End file.
